I think he may be right about Latour overstating the language-reductiveness of speech act theory, etc. and analytic philosophers certainly are interested in being as well as language. However, I think it's also fair to say that Latour goes a long way beyond where any of these people end up.

In AIME he argues the following (I paraphrase loosely but, I think, accurately) with regard to language and metaphysics: everything relates with or 'passes through' something else in order to continue existing; therefore everything joins things together, everything 'articulates'; each mode is a particular kind of articulation, a particular way of relating; thus every mode can be understood as having different truth procedures or standards of meaning; everything articulates, everything interprets, everything judges—from tics to popes, as Latour puts it at one point; language is just one way of articulating, among others, though it is not a mode itself but a mixture, presumably, of [tec]hnology, [fic]tion and others; when we speak or write we are simply taking advantage of a capacity that already exists in the world—namely, articulation; language is an invention that utilises and renders unusually explicit and dynamic what was there all along; thus we can understand the world in language, not as a 'lens' or anything of the sort but as something with real purchase on how things are because meaningful articulation is how things are.

Making AIME all about language is, therefore, rather misleading. Although it makes use of lots of linguistic philosophy it's utterly metaphysical at heart. To suggest that 'ontology' and 'metaphysics' are empty signifiers because it's really all about language—that misses the whole point of what Latour is trying to do. Saying that 'practices' also have a meaningful structure and therefore discourse theory, etc. isn't all about language isn't sufficient either—that's like an agoraphobic setting one foot outside his front door and saying that he's been around the world and back.

For Latour the evolution of sea algae in and of itself is as meaningful and articulated as this sentence, as any sentence. I can't see Searle et al. getting on board with that! Now, that's not to say that there can't be all sorts of productive conversations between these thinkers of language and meaning but, suffice to say, I don't think that ontology and metaphysics are empty signifiers.

Most have heard of the Battle of Waterloo, but who has heard of the volcano called Tambora? No school textbook I’ve seen mentions that only two months before Napoleon’s final defeat in Belgium on June 18, 1815, the faraway Indonesian island of Sumbawa was the site of the most devastating volcanic eruption on Earth in thousands of years.

Read the whole thing, it's superb. It's also funny that the title is the way around that it is. Isn't it remarkable that Napoleon is the thing that the volcano is having to measure up to?! In the comments the author suggests that the reason why this event is almost unknown while the far less devastating eruption at Krakatoa in 1883 is legendary is that telegraph systems were up and running by that time and thus everyone in the West heard about it almost immediately instead of just experiencing a bunch of strange climatological and atmospheric goings-on indirectly.

Maybe one day volcanoes will set the benchmarks for warmongering statesmen to measure up to.

Monday, 7 April 2014

The materialists pull everything down from the sky and out of the invisible world onto the earth as if they wanted to clench rocks and oak trees in their fists. They grasp them, and stubbornly maintain that the only objects that exist are those that are tangible and comprehensible. They believe that the physical existence of an object is existence itself, and look down smugly on other people — those who acknowledge another area of existence separate from the physical. But they are totally unwilling to listen to another point of view.

There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

Many many millions of years ago a race of hyperintelligent, pandimensional beings (whose physical manifestation in their own
pan-dimensional universe is not dissimilar to our own) got so fed up with
the constant bickering about the meaning of life which used to interrupt
their favourite pastime of Brockian Ultra Cricket (a curious game which
involved suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then
running away) that they decided to sit down and solve their problems once
and for all.

And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super computer
which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks had
been connected up it had started from I think therefore I am and got as far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed
to turn it off.

It was the size of a small city.

Its main console was installed in a specially designed executive office, mounted on an enormous executive desk of finest ultramahagony
topped with rich ultrared leather. The dark carpeting was discreetly
sumptuous, exotic pot plants and tastefully engraved prints of the
principal computer programmers and their families were deployed liberally
about the room, and stately windows looked out upon a tree-lined public
square.

On the day of the Great On-Turning two soberly dressed programmers
with brief cases arrived and were shown discreetly into the office. They
were aware that this day they would represent their entire race in its greatest moment, but they conducted themselves calmly and quietly as they
seated themselves deferentially before the desk, opened their brief cases
and took out their leather-bound notebooks.

Their names were Lunkwill and Fook.

For a few moments they sat in respectful silence, then, after exchanging a quiet glance with Fook, Lunkwill leaned forward and touched a
small black panel.

The subtlest of hums indicated that the massive computer was now in
total active mode. After a pause it spoke to them in a voice rich resonant
and deep.

It said: "What is this great task for which I, Deep Thought, the
second greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space have been
called into existence?"

Lunkwill and Fook glanced at each other in surprise.

"Your task, O Computer..." began Fook.

"No, wait a minute, this isn't right," said Lunkwill, worried. "We distinctly designed this computer to be the greatest one ever and we're not making do with second best. Deep Thought," he addressed the computer,
"are you not as we designed you to be, the greatest most powerful computer
in all time?"

"I described myself as the second greatest," intoned Deep Thought,
"and such I am."

Another worried look passed between the two programmers. Lunkwill
cleared his throat.

"There must be some mistake," he said, "are you not a greatest
computer than the Milliard Gargantubrain which can count all the atoms in a star in a millisecond?"

"And are you not," said Fook leaning anxiously forward, "a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light
and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust
particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?"

"A five-week sand blizzard?" said Deep Thought haughtily. "You ask
this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big
Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."

The two programmers sat in uncomfortable silence for a moment. Then
Lunkwill leaned forward again.

"But are you not," he said, "a more fiendish disputant than the Great
Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler of Ciceronicus 12, the Magic and
Indefatigable?"

"The Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler," said Deep
Thought thoroughly rolling the r's, "could talk all four legs off an
Arcturan MegaDonkey - but only I could persuade it to go for a walk
afterwards."

"Then what," asked Fook, "is the problem?"

"There is no problem," said Deep Thought with magnificent ringing
tones. "I am simply the second greatest computer in the Universe of Space
and Time."

"But the second?" insisted Lunkwill. "Why do you keep saying the
second? You're surely not thinking of the Multicorticoid Perspicutron Titan Muller are you? Or the Pondermatic? Or the..."

Contemptuous lights flashed across the computer's console.

"I spare not a single unit of thought on these cybernetic simpletons!" he boomed. "I speak of none but the computer that is to come
after me!"

Fook was losing patience. He pushed his notebook aside and muttered,
"I think this is getting needlessly messianic."

"You know nothing of future time," pronounced Deep Thought, "and yet
in my teeming circuitry I can navigate the infinite delta streams of future probability and see that there must one day come a computer whose
merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate, but which it
will be my fate eventually to design."

Fook sighed heavily and glanced across to Lunkwill.

"Can we get on and ask the question?" he said.

Lunkwill motioned him to wait.

"What computer is this of which you speak?" he asked.

"I will speak of it no further in this present time," said Deep Thought. "Now. Ask what else of me you will that I may function. Speak."

They shrugged at each other. Fook composed himself.

"O Deep Thought Computer," he said, "the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us..." he paused, "...the Answer!"

"Yes," said Deep Thought. "Life, the Universe, and Everything. There
is an answer. But," he added, "I'll have to think about it."

A sudden commotion destroyed the moment: the door flew open and two
angry men wearing the coarse faded-blue robes and belts of the Cruxwan
University burst into the room, thrusting aside the ineffectual flunkies who tried to bar their way.

"We demand admission!" shouted the younger of the two men elbowing a
pretty young secretary in the throat.

"Come on," shouted the older one, "you can't keep us out!" He pushed
a junior programmer back through the door.

"We demand that you can't keep us out!" bawled the younger one,
though he was now firmly inside the room and no further attempts were
being made to stop him.

"Who are you?" said Lunkwill, rising angrily from his seat. "What do
you want?"

"Alright!" bawled Vroomfondel banging on an nearby desk. "I am
Vroomfondel, and that is not a demand, that is a solid fact! What we
demand is solid facts!"

"No we don't!" exclaimed Majikthise in irritation. "That is precisely
what we don't demand!"

Scarcely pausing for breath, Vroomfondel shouted, "We don't demand
solid facts! What we demand is a total absence of solid facts. I demand
that I may or may not be Vroomfondel!"

"But who the devil are you?" exclaimed an outraged Fook.

"We," said Majikthise, "are Philosophers."

"Though we may not be," said Vroomfondel waving a warning finger at the programmers.

"Yes we are," insisted Majikthise. "We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages,
Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this machine off, and
we want it off now!"

"What's the problem?" said Lunkwill.

"I'll tell you what the problem is mate," said Majikthise,
"demarcation, that's the problem!"

"We demand," yelled Vroomfondel, "that demarcation may or may not be
the problem!"

"You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned
Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very
much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the
Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of
your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our
sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if
this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next
morning?"

"That's right!" agreed Majikthise. "You'll have a national Philosopher's strike on your hands!"

The hum level in the room suddenly increased as several ancillary bass driver units, mounted in sedately carved and varnished cabinet
speakers around the room, cut in to give Deep Thought's voice a little
more power.

"All I wanted to say," bellowed the computer, "is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer to the Ultimate
Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything," - he paused and satisfied
himself that he now had everyone's attention, before continuing more
quietly, "but the programme will take me a little while to run."

Fook glanced impatiently at his watch.

"How long?" he said.

"Seven and a half million years," said Deep Thought.
Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other.

"Seven and a half million years!.." they cried in chorus.

"Yes," declaimed Deep Thought, "I said I'd have to think about it,
didn't I? And it occurs to me that running a programme like this is bound
to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole area of
philosophy in general. Everyone's going to have their own theories about
what answer I'm eventually to come up with, and who better to capitalize
on that media market than you yourself? So long as you can keep
disagreeing with each other violently enough and slagging each other off
in the popular press, you can keep yourself on the gravy train for life.
How does that sound?"

The two philosophers gaped at him.

"Bloody hell," said Majikthise, "now that is what I call thinking.
Here Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?"

"Dunno," said Vroomfondel in an awed whisper, "think our brains must
be too highly trained Majikthise."

So saying, they turned on their heels and walked out of the door and
into a lifestyle beyond their wildest dreams.